Do Soccer Players Perform Better Drunk?

Andy Carroll, Liverpool’s new center-forward, arguably looks like the future of English soccer. He’s only 22, Liverpool recently paid Newcastle £35 million (approx. $57 million) for him, and he plays for England. But in another light, Carroll looks like English soccer’s past: He’s a big center-forward who likes beer. Recall, for instance, an unfortunate incident when he was at Newcastle. After he’d had eight or nine pints in the Blu Bambu nightclub, a glass “accidentally” slipped out of his hand and cut another drinker on the eye. "He needs to improve, to drink less," England’s manager Fabio Capello said recently. "I spoke with him, in private."

We’ve been here before. Capello’s words echoed those of an England manager 18 years earlier: When Graham Taylor, miming the act of bringing glass to month, advised another young talent from Newcastle, Paul Gascoigne, to watch his “refueling.” It didn’t help. "Gazza" became the umpteenth great British alcoholic soccer player. At first glance, the fuss about Carroll’s drinking seems to belong in a long continuum. In fact, it doesn’t. It’s more like an end. English soccer has almost entirely ditched the bottle, and thus shed one of its great competitive disadvantages. A tradition dies.

There always used to be two types of British soccer player: The ones who like a drink and the alcoholics. Many of the best were alcoholics: George Best, Gazza, Jimmy Greaves, and Jim Baxter, for instance. English soccer actively encouraged drinking. On cold days, a whisky bottle might be passed around the locker room before kickoff, and afterward, there were beers all around. These were methods of male bonding modeled — like so much else in British soccer — on the British army.

Few British players before the mid-1990s felt obliged to look after their bodies. Access to drink at all hours was part of the reward for being a soccer player. You could afford it, it relieved the pressure to perform, and it nicely filled the empty afternoons. Binge drinking was considered a hobby.

"I spent 90% of my money on women, drink and fast cars. The rest I wasted," Best liked to joke. And it’s not by chance that he mentioned women and drink in one breath. Booze has always been the lubricant of the British mating game. Alcohol was first distilled to enable Britons to procreate.

The result was the life that the Dutch midfielder Arnold Mühren encountered at Manchester United in the 1980s. After training, he recalled later, the whole team would often go to a pub for "lunch." "But these were lunches," said Mühren, "where not a bread roll was ever served."

Alex Ferguson, who had himself run a pub called "Fergie’s" in Glasgow in the '70s, saw it all when he became United’s manager in 1986. "Maybe in earlier generations the drinking culture carried over from the working-class origins of the players," Ferguson later wrote in his autobiography. "Most of them came from families where many of the men took the view that if they put in a hard shift in a factory or a coal mine, they were entitled to relax with a few pints… Also prevalent is the notion that Saturday night is the end of the working week and therefore a good time to get wrecked."

Did England perform better at international competitions when they were drunks? Read on to find out...